The ‘transvestite potter from Essex’

I was intrigued to meet Grayson Perry — who wouldn’t be? I hadn’t known his work before he hit the national headlines in 2003 as one of the artists shortlisted for the Turner Prize, which he subsequently carried off in triumph as his alter ego ‘Claire’, dressed to kill in mauve satin frock with ankle socks and red patent-leather Mary-Jane shoes. Since then, everything I’ve seen or heard indicates a truly original talent, an integrity matched with iconoclastic wit. The ambivalent, often mesmerising beauty of his ceramic vases at Tate Britain was almost upstaged by his extrovert ‘tranny’ persona, and both combined to unsettle the pundits — do pots, even ones as finely made and laden with drama as his are, really count as ‘art’? How seriously are we to take Grayson, or indeed Claire? He immediately sent up this Turner controversy on an elegant jar called ‘Taste and Democracy’ on which a scantily clad couple agree that ‘It’s about time a transvestite won the Turner Prize’, and that ‘Pottery is the new video’.

The day I met him at the Koestler Art Centre at HMP Wormwood Scrubs he was in mufti, baggy jersey and jeans, with his sleeves metaphorically rolled up to make the final choices for Insider Art, the exhibition of prison art he has co-curated for the ICA. As a transvestite and a bit of an outsider himself, he has always been interested in art from the margins, so this was right up his street. Now he found himself wandering through room upon room of paintings, drawings, sculptures and ceramics, hung hugger-mugger for the judging process — thousands of submissions from prisons all over the UK to the annual Koestler Awards. How did they strike him? I wondered. ‘It’s like taking a tour through the collective subconscious,’ he said.